What is Intuition?
A sixth sense? A feminine art? Occultist twaddle? None of the above...?
Dr David Audley is an orientalist, an accidental Lothario, and the protagonist of Anthony Price’s propulsive—if somewhat unsatisfying—thriller, The Labyrinth Makers.1 He (Dr Audley, that is) is also a masterful investigator, vested with an uncanny ability to sense when something is amiss or not-quite-right in the facts being presented to him by duplicitous witnesses or his plotting superiors—indeed, this is precisely what makes him, an otherwise opinionated and troublesome employee, such a valuable asset to his paymasters at the Ministry of Defence. I have a friend a bit like Audley, seemingly blessed with a pair of invisible antenna, only instead of picking on fissures in a case-file or cover-story, hers twitch at the suggestion of subtext, double-meaning, or hidden intention in human interaction. It’s almost annoying, and makes her difficult to bluff to or be quietly annoyed at. If you’ve felt it, she’s almost certainly sensed it…
Most of us, I would venture, know or have known someone who displays similar uncanny cognitive abilities, although perhaps in other domains. Maybe it’s someone who always just seems to have a feel for cooking, for how much of an ingredient to add or how much to stir the batter. Or maybe it’s someone who always seems to be in the right place, at the right time to turn a profit. So recognisable are these abilities, in fact, that we have a well-used word to refer to them, ‘intuition’. Audley, my friend, the cook, and the man-with-the-Midas-touch are all, in their own ways, highly ‘intuitive’ people. There is—to my mind, at least—a degree of conceptual confusion in how we deploy this term—one that, oddly enough, Dr Audley is well-placed to help us resolve.
In our colloquial usage, the term seems to refer to something like an extra, quasi-super-natural faculty. To say that someone “has intuition” is to say that they have a faculty that is unlike and irreducible to the hum-drum ones that all mortals possess. It isn’t mere rational thought, it isn’t mere visual, olfactory, auditory, or sensory perception; it is something else entirely. It is, in other words, to slip into spooky-talk and to speak quite seriously of invisible antennae. And this, in my experience, is a use of the term that intuition-havers themselves happily embrace.
Not Dr Audley, however. As it happens, The Labyrinth Makers contains a brief but demystifying account of what intuition might be, and, by extension, of why we so often go wrong in trying to characterise it. It appears in the novel’s early pages, during an early morning meeting that a bleary-eyed Dr Audley has been unceremoniously summoned to. When a colleague expresses his surprise that Audley has immediately seen through a case-report’s phoniness, Audley sighs and reflects that,
It would be easier to admit an inspired hunch than to explain that he could look between the gaps in the narrative, the sudden thinness of the material, the changes of style, the tiny inconsistencies of editing. All of which suggested the removal of something too intriguing to be left to the common gaze.2
Audley’s intuition, his sense that something is missing, is not an ‘inspired hunch’, borne of chance or the operations of some standalone spooky faculty. It isn’t even one thing. Instead, it is the result of multiple micro-expectations about how an authentic or unmodified briefing document should look being disappointed–of that is, the narrative not flowing, and the style and content not being as homogenous, as he, a maven analyst, could have expected. In this sense then, ‘intuition’ is little more than a dimension of expertise.3
To see why, briefly consider the difference between the novice and the expert’s action.
The novice operates clumsily, applying coarse rules of behaviour, blind to contextual particularities. It doesn’t matter much where these rules come from, whether they are provided by an external source (such as driving instructor or a recipe telling him to keep his hands at ten-and-two or to only add one-and-a-half cups of water for every cup of sticky rice) or internally formulated by a process of trial-and-error (such as after a budding analyst is conned two or three times by the same sort of discrepancy in cover stories), the basic structure of the novice’s action is constant—first, he decomposes the world into a number of discrete chunks that can be grasped in abstraction from a particular context (such as, ‘hands’, ‘pedals, ‘cups’, ‘feet’, etc.) and then he deliberately applies a number of rules of behaviour to them, irrespective of the situation-at-hand’s particularities (such as, the driving conditions or the model of rice machine).
As a person accumulates experience, however, climbing out of noviceship, past early, intermediate, and advanced proficiency, and ultimately into full expertise, they move away from applying context-free rules and towards spontaneously responding to the world as they encounter it. They begin by learning to respond to situational cues that exceed language such as engine sound, pedestrian body language, or rice texture (no rule or proposition can capture the ‘right engine sound’; it just has to be heard and eventually recognised). Next, they learn to more fully plan out their actions based on these situational features, responding—albeit, initially, consciously—to the world as it is given to them rather than dumbly applying rules. Then, finally, as they encounter more and more of the world, the crutch of conscious reflection falls away and action emerges as a smooth, spontaneous response to the world as it is encountered. Hands are placed, water is poured, breaks are pumped not because of some rule or prescription but because of how the world is, in that moment. The agent is no longer a novice deliberately or reflecting on his every move, but an expert guided by an embodied, even preconscious, sense of what just feels right to do.
This sense, I think, is what we refer to as ‘intuition’. An expert driver just sensing how to position his arm or whether a pedestrian is about the cross the street displays what in other contexts we would describe as ‘intuition’. And both Dr Audley and my friend display what in other context we would simply describe as ‘expertise’, ‘skill’, or, following some psychologists, ‘flow’.4 Presented with the case-document, the experienced Audley has a sense—an expectation, or group thereof—of what it should look like, of how it should go, and is, after just a quick scan or two, able to see that there is something not-quite-right. His intuition, then, is not some ‘inspired hunch’ or spooky faculty, superseding his touch, sight, and hearing but rather a sense of the world that emerges from the expertly arrangement of all three of these and more in the course of some activity (in this case, critically analysing documents).
[There is here an unanswered question about why people like my friend, despite ostensibly having no more experience of the world than their peers, develop such fine-tuned social expertise. Now, while I don’t have a wholly worked out or satisfying answer to this question, I note that on this account of intuition-as-expertise it is not much different to asking why some aspiring tennis players or cooks demonstrate a certain feel or affinity for the activity in question. Both, I’d wager, have a similar answer.]
Crucially, this account of intuition also explains why we so often go wrong in explaining what intuition is. On its terms, the sense of what the world is and should be like that intuitive people respond to is preverbal/preconscious. As a result, phenomenologically-speaking, they encounter the world as just feeling and pulling them to act in a certain way, and what it is that they are responding to and why often escapes their conscious notice. If pushed to reflect to their action, they might, like David Audley, be able to clumsily itemise some of what caught their notice, but the ability to do so well is not a prerequisite for expertly action, or widely shared amongst experts. Many—even most—experts lack Audley’s capacities for reflection and articulation, and so are liable to mischaracterise their experiences in spooky or even superhuman terms.
But there is no need for us to succumb to this sort of self-aggrandising expert propaganda. They are not deities or demigods but people with particular ways of engaging with the world—ways that, insofar as everyone is an expert in something (down to the most mundane skills like walking, cycling, admiring art, riffing with friends, etc.), we all have some access to and experience of.
Anthony Price, The Labyrinth Makers (Penguin Classics, 2024).
Price, 17.
See Hubert L. Dreyfus et al., eds., Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 1. for this account of skill acquisition.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1989).
I see you not only cover topics in depth but in breadth too. Some of your pieces are interesting/well-conceptualised, a couple are above my head; but this was such an interesting and fun read making good sense throughout.